Larry Laudan

Philosophical dialogue is a curious activity. Arguments are expected to be rigorous, but no demand is made that there must be evidence for the premisses. Terminology is expected to be precise, but its appropriateness to the subject matter under discussion can be left unexplored. Officially, nothing is conceded; but, in fact, a great deal is taken for granted. Ad argumentum mingles indiscriminately with ad hominem; and, above all, the evidential warrant for one’s philosophical claims is, like the topics of sex and religion to the less enlightened, one of those delicate issues never to be discussed in mixed company.Such conventions as these that are associated with contemporary philosophical exchange make it difficult to have a balanced discussion about Progress and Its Problems. That work is, in the first instance, a descriptive model of theory change in science. It purports to establish what sorts of factors have in fact influenced scientific decision-making.

In this short essay the author deals with the fundamental question of whether the Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) model has sufficient grounds to be considered as a substitute of the current criminal standard of proof (proof Beyond All Reasonable Doubt). After giving an overview of the IBE model as proposed in more general fields such as epistemology and the philosophy of science, and after concluding that the IBE has failed as a model of the acceptance and rejection of scientific theories, the author analysis its plausibility when applied as a decision rule for inferring if the accused is guilty or not.Resumen:En este artículo, el autor aborda la cuestión fundamental de si el modelo de la Inferencia a la Mejor Explicación (IME) es adecuado o no para fungir como sustituto del Estándar de Prueba (E de P) actual que rige en materia penal en los Estados Unidos de América (prueba más allá de toda duda razonable). Luego de una breve exposición del esquema general de la IME propuesto en los terrenos de la epistemología y la filosofía de la ciencia, y luego de concluir que se trata de un modelo deficiente para explicar la actividad consistente en la aceptación y rechazo de teorías científicas, el autor procede al análisis específico de su aplicación en el campo de la decisión (de un juez o jurado) relativa a la culpabilidad o inocencia del penalmente inculpado.

This paper propounds the following theses: 1). that the traditional focus on the Blackstone ratio of errors as a device for setting the criminal standard of proof is ill-conceived, 2). that the preoccupation with the rate of false convictions in criminal trials is myopic, and 3). that the key ratio of interest, in judging the political morality of a system of criminal justice, involves the relation between the risk that an innocent person runs of being falsely convicted of a serious crime and the risk of being criminally victimized by someone who was falsely acquitted.

This book consists of a collection of essays written between 1965 and 1981. Some have been published elsewhere; others appear here for the first time. Although dealing with different figures and different periods, they have a common theme: all are concerned with examining how the method of hy pothesis came to be the ruling orthodoxy in the philosophy of science and the quasi-official methodology of the scientific community. It might have been otherwise. Barely three centuries ago, hypothetico deduction was in both disfavor and disarray. Numerous rival methods for scientific inquiry - including eliminative and enumerative induction, analogy and derivation from first principles - were widely touted. The method of hypothesis, known since antiquity, found few proponents between 1700 and 1850. During the last century, of course, that ordering has been inverted and - despite an almost universal acknowledgement of its weaknesses - the method of hypothesis (usually under such descriptions as 'hypothetico deduction' or 'conjectures and refutations') has become the orthodoxy of the 20th century. Behind the waxing and waning of the method of hypothesis, embedded within the vicissitudes of its fortunes, there is a fascinating story to be told. It is a story that forms an integral part of modern science and its philosophy.

Most contributions to Whewell scholarship have tended to stress the idealistic, antiempirical temper of Whewell’s philosophy. Thus, the only two monograph-length studies on Whewell, Blanché’s Le Rationalisme de Whewell and Marcucci’s L’ ‘Idealismo’ Scientifico di William Whewell, are, as their titles suggest, concerned primarily with Whewell’s departures from classical British empiricism. Particularly in his famous dispute with Mill, it has proved tempting to parody Whewell’s position in the debate by treating it as a straightforward encounter between an arch-empiricist and an arch-rationalist. There is, however, a danger that an emphasis on the necessitarian and a priori elements in Whewell’s philosophy may well obscure the unmistakable empirical emphasis in Whewell’s theory of science. I think it is time to begin to redress the balance, by focusing attention on the significant ‘empiricist’ strains in Whewell’s philosophy of science. One of the most important of those strains is connected with the operation which Whewell calls ‘the consilience of inductions’.

Este artigo, originalmente publicado em History of Science, vol. 7 , pp. 1-63, contém talvez a mais completa bibliografia existente sobre as teorias do método, além de fornecer preciosas indicações para o seu uso e para o estudo da história da metodologia em geral. Agradecemos ao Professor Larry Laudan por ter preparado, especialmente para a tradução brasileira, um suplemento bibliográfico contendo muitos títulos novos. Embora o texto do ensaio original permaneça praticamente inalterado, algumas notas foram modificadas, de maneira a incluírem referências à bibliografia suplementar. Óbvios erros de impressão da edição original foram suprimidos. Na apresentação da bibliografia seguimos, com poucas modificações, as convenções do original

This essay contains a partial exploration of some key concepts associated with the epistemology of realist philosophies of science. It shows that neither reference nor approximate truth will do the explanatory jobs that realists expect of them. Equally, several widely-held realist theses about the nature of inter-theoretic relations and scientific progress are scrutinized and found wanting. Finally, it is argued that the history of science, far from confirming scientific realism, decisively confutes several extant versions of avowedly 'naturalistic' forms of scientific realism

For positivists and post-positivists alike, methodology had a decidedly suspect status. Positivists saw methodological rules as stipulative conventions, void of any empirical content. Post-positivists (especially naturalistic ones) see such rules as mere descriptions of how research is conducted, carrying no normative force. It is argued here that methodological rules are fundamentally empirical claims, but ones which have significant normative bite. Methodology is thus divorced both from foundationalism and conventionalism.

For more than a half-century, evidence scholars have been exploring whether the criminal standard of proof can be grounded in decision theory. Such grounding would require the emergence of a social consensus about the utilities to be assigned to the four outcomes at trial. Significant disagreement remains, even among legal scholars, about the relative desirability of those outcomes and even about the formalisms for manipulating their respective utilities. We attempt to diagnose the principal reasons for this dissensus and to suggest ways in which a broadly shared evaluation might be forged, both with respect to the appropriate equations for defining the standard of proof and with respect to the appropriate utilities to associate with the various trial outcomes. Where consensus cannot be forged, we hold that remaining differences can probably be finessed. We also suggest ways to elicit the utilities of individuals on these matters so as to avoid the usual flaws of such surveys. Along the way, we note a). the disproportionate role that the Blackstone ratio of errors continues to play in appraisals of the utilities of trial outcomes (despite its unintelligibility in the context of utilities) and b). the persisting belief -for which there is no theoretical basis-that every plausible assignment of utilities will inevitably result in a very high standard of proof. Finally, we examine some of the technical features associated with a proposed rank ordering of the utilities of trial outcomes.